Noyce Scholars

Gearing up:
Noyce Scholar Robin Shaulis ’11 (front) demonstrates seine-hauling technique to students at a GEAR-UP academy at VIMS. GEAR-UP is a college readiness program for students in high-needs schools. Shaulis is a member of the William & Mary School of Education class of 2012, majoring in biology education.

They master STEM content—and also understand how to teach it

by Joseph McClain
| May 2, 2012

America needs more good, seasoned
K-12 STEM teachers—a set of professionals who not only understand science and
math, but who also know how to make other people understand science and math.

“An expert teacher needs to do
both,” said Paul Heideman. “Not having the content knowledge or not having the
beginnings of expertise in pedagogy—both of those things are bad.”

It’s the goal of the Robert Noyce
Scholars Program to produce professionals who can do both, says Heideman,
professor of biology at William & Mary—and to keep them in the profession.
Heideman is one of the principal investigators of William & Mary’s Noyce
Scholar Program. The management team for the program is made up of faculty from
both Arts & Sciences and the School of Education. Heideman said the William
& Mary Noyce Scholars Program is one of more than 100 such Noyce
initiatives around the country. All Noyce Scholars Programs are funded by the
National Science Foundation.

More math and science
teachers needed

“The whole intent of the program
nationwide is to try to get more science and math teachers,” Heideman said.
“It’s been very popular with Congress. They want teachers who are much better
prepared in their content area and who are much better prepared to operate in
high-need settings.”

He explained that the program leads science
and math majors in Arts & Sciences through the teacher certification
process. Each Noyce scholar receives a scholarship of $5,000 per semester in
return for a pledge to teach a STEM subject in a high-need school. Heideman
said the program offers one- and two-year tracks, as well as a five-year
arrangement that leads to a master’s degree from the School of Education as well
as a bachelor of science. Noyce alumni are asked to teach for a year for every
semester of scholarship support they receive.

Many William & Mary students
become Noyce Scholars after getting some teaching experience through summer
internships offered by Teachers for a Competitive Tomorrow, a “sister program”
funded by the U.S. Department of Education.

Heideman says that William &
Mary’s science and math majors tend to be strong in their content areas, but
cautions that knowing the science isn’t the same thing as being able to teach
the science.

“The research on experts and
expertise says that experts are not necessarily good teachers,” he said. “If
you want an expert to be a good teacher, they have to learn to be a good teacher. In fact, experts can be terrible
teachers, because they don’t recognize how novices think anymore.”

Pedagogy and
practicum components

The program has several components
to help Noyce scholars on their way to become excellent STEM teachers.
Marguerite Mason and Juanita Jo Matkins, science- and math-education
specialists in the School of Education, conduct pedagogy components, while
Kevin Goff, also of the School of Education, offers a practicum experience in
teaching science and math in high-need schools.

Heideman says William & Mary’s Noyce
Scholars Program has 10 students each year. In early 2012, 15 Noyce alumni were
teaching math, chemistry, biology, earth sciences or physics in grades 6-12.

“We promised the NSF to support 40
over the five years of the grant. We are on pace to do a little bit better than
that,” he said. Results of the William & Mary group seem to be in line with
national trends for Noyce Scholars.

“School administrators like
hiring Noyce scholars. They find that they are more likely to be effective;
they move into leadership roles faster than their peers,” Heideman said.

The Noyce Scholars team is
starting to discuss a second, assessment -based, phase of the program to
evaluate which of the educational models work best. Heideman said they also
want to assess retention, one of the knottiest issues in STEM education.

“Right now about half of the
science and math teachers end up leaving the profession within five years,” he
said. “The first year, especially, is tough. Being a first-year teacher is
really hard. You’re doing a lot of stuff for the first time, you’re dealing
with a lot of classroom issues and you’re dealing with all this new
preparation. It can be so discouraging that people drop out who would be just
fine if they just stuck it out.”

Getting through that
first bumpy year

To help Noyce Scholars prepare for
that first bumpy year or two, the W&M Noyce program incorporates a teaching
practicum course that gives students experience, especially in high-need
settings. The course outlines realistic expectations for gaining expertise in
teaching and emphasizes practical application of their formal coursework in the
School of Education. In addition, Heideman teaches a 1-credit course titled How
Students Learn. The course applies findings from cognitive psychology and neuroscience
to help teachers understand learning, memory, and expertise. The class
discusses professional-improvement strategies such as “deliberate practice,”
which he explains as “recognizing that you’re not strong enough in one
particular area of your work, and paying attention to what works and what
doesn’t.”

There’s another reason to
encourage STEM teachers to stay the course: Teachers don’t become truly expert
until they have several years of experience.

“All the research says that
really good potential teachers are going to become expert teachers sometime
around their eighth, ninth, tenth year of teaching,” Heideman said. “They may
be quite good much earlier, but for true expertise and people who can be great
examples who mentor others as experts, that’s going to take eight or ten
years.”